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Selling the Yellow Jersey
The Tour de France in the Global Era
By Eric Reed The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-20667-7
CHAPTER 1
Sport, Bicycling, and Globalization in the Print Era: Convergences and Divergences
The Tour de France was the greatest of the early twentieth century's bicycle racing spectacles. The race was also one of the few professional sporting events that spectators could watch free of charge with their friends, family, and neighbors along country roads, in town squares, or even from the front doors of their homes. Writer Colette, in 1912, described the roadside as a "family picnic blanket" for the hundreds of spectators watching the Tour pass through the Paris suburbs in the last stage of the race. Nearly a century later, Jacques Goddet, the Tour's organizer for nearly a half century, and important sponsors continued to characterize the spectacle as a "family event." The author's own experience in 1999 standing at "Dutch Corner" amid hundreds of raucous, orange-clad Dutch cycling fans as Lance Armstrong and his challengers toiled up the steep switchbacks of the Alpe d'Huez an arm's length away confirmed the special character of the Tour. It is a singularly intimate sporting spectacle with no physical barriers between the spectators and the action.
Nevertheless, only a tiny handful of people—a few hundred journalists, race organizers, sponsors, and racing team personnel—see the entire Tour de France in person. The Tour has always been a spectacle that most fans follow from start to finish only in newspapers or on television. The media audience of the race has surpassed the number of roadside spectators since the Tour's first days. In the new millennium, Tour organizers claim an annual potential audience of two billion telespectators in 170 countries, although the number of actual viewers is much smaller.
During the "print era" of the event, from 1903 to the Second World War, the French experienced the Tour in an increasingly simultaneous time frame as more and more of them read about it in their daily newspapers. At this time, too, the press lay at the heart of the Tour's commercial strategies. It was through newspaper coverage and print advertising that the race organizers, bicycle manufacturers, sponsors, host towns, and cyclists associated with the event reached their audiences and reaped publicity, profits, sales, and celebrity. The Tour stood at the heart of an ever-expanding community of fan readers upon whose patronage the event's commercial stakeholders depended. The Tour's evolution in its early years demonstrates how the mass press helped to establish modern regimes of consumerism and leisure in France.
The Tour's history is one example of the new kind of interconnectedness that arose during the industrial era thanks to the rise of mass media and the increasingly rapid exchange of goods, services, people, and culture across vast distances. Similar, convergent processes were underway in France and elsewhere that fueled the emergence of modern, global sporting culture into which the Tour was born. Millions across the globe rode bikes, played soccer and baseball, and became spectators and fans of the professional sports that established themselves at the same time. But, of course, no "world headquarters" for globalization existed. Local histories of sport diverged, despite burgeoning interconnectedness and the emergence of common athletic practices and structures. Communities, nations, and regions catalyzed the globalization process as they managed their interactions with the broader world in accordance with their local desires, outlooks, and commercial or political imperatives. Furthermore, as the pace and scale of global interactions escalated over time, local practices and identities defined themselves and evolved in relation to such interactions. Despite the perceived homogenizing effects of exchange in the modern era—such as the adoption of common practices, language, and work and leisure regimes—often globalization reaffirmed the sacrosanct position of the local.
1. Modern Convergences
The symbiotic relationship between mass consumption, mass leisure, and mass production drove the industrialization process forward and instigated a sea change in leisure and labor throughout the modernizing world. The emergence of modern sport across the globe beginning in the late nineteenth century illustrates these convergent trends, and not just in France. As millions began to ride bicycles and play soccer, baseball, basketball, and other sports, industries arose to satisfy the mass demand for sporting goods. Modern sport began as an urban phenomenon. Inhabitants of expanding cities spent more and more of their increasing cash incomes on new leisure pursuits, including buying tickets to sporting events. Both trends spurred the rise of commercialized spectatorship and athletic professionalism. More people traveled for work and play. In the process they disseminated their culture, world views, and leisure practices, including their sports, across distances. The history of modern sport, then, is tied to the broader commercialization of mass leisure culture that has taken place since the Industrial Revolution.
Newspapers played a key role in these transformations. The mass press taught their readers about new sport and leisure activities. The press encouraged the practice of modern athletics and, through the advertisements they published, dictated consumer tastes and desires and stimulated mass consumption of sporting goods. In these ways, the press fostered sporting communities where none existed. American baseball historians, for example, have argued that journalists' invention in the mid-nineteenth century of common statistical measures such as batting averages and pitching earned run averages established a common language that could be spoken and understood even by casual fans in and outside the ballpark. Fans followed the games in absentia thanks to the printed box score, a statistical narrative of how the game played out over time as well as the individual contributions of each player to the contest. The new baseball language created a common frame of reference that allowed supporters of teams in different parts of America to talk to each other about the sport in meaningful ways. It also stimulated the development of a self-referential, historical understanding of baseball, since reporters and fans could compare, contrast, and argue about players and teams of different eras using standardized statistical measures. Today, baseball is played on four continents and its unique statistical system and lexicon provide a common frame of reference and sporting language for the sport's fans and players around the world.
More broadly, the press helped to constitute new kinds of communities and connections among people where none existed before. The rise of modern communications systems, including the mass press, since the Industrial Revolution facilitated increasingly rapid and complex exchanges of ideas, languages, technologies, information, and culture. Important cultural and psychological changes also accompanied the elaboration of new communications structures. Scholars have analyzed extensively the centrality of the mass press in fostering modern national political identities—that reading, especially newspaper reading, helped to engender a consciousness of belonging to a community that shared a common heritage and destiny and that experienced a common history simultaneously, even though most members of the nation never came in physical contact with one another. The development of these new political identities accompanied and helped to spur the process of nation building that has gone on since the political and economic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Sport and sporting competition embodied the emergent sense of the imagined national community and identity in many Western societies as the nation- and empire-building process moved forward in the nineteenth century. Even more, increasing specialization and commercialization of the press industry—including the rise of niche periodicals like those dedicated to sports—in the late nineteenth century helped to constitute new, increasingly specialized, transnational communities of readers based on common political interest and cultural outlooks. By the turn of the twentieth century, the feeling that technology and imperialism had condensed the world and erased the perceived distances among people created a feeling that Westerners existed in an "expanded living space" that included much of the globe.
Sport occupied an important place in this increasingly interconnected world. Imperialism and expanding travel and educational networks seeded new sports around the globe and sparked unanticipated athletic and cultural exchanges. In the Francophone world, sport helped engender a shared sense of identity that was built on the diversity of experiences in the French imperial diaspora. Philip Dine argues that the development of modern, European-style sporting culture after 1870 in Algeria—a colony annexed to metropolitan France in 1834—facilitated the "emergence of [a] self-aware and self-assertive settler culture in colonial Algeria." European sports, brought by colonists and appropriated by North Africans, became memes in a perceived "pan-Mediterranean culture" and touchstones of postcolonial reconciliation and lingering animosities between France and its former colony after Algerian independence in 1962.
The British, too, carried sports like cricket, soccer, and rugby with them as they expanded their formal and informal empires in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was believed that playing sports like cricket and introducing them to imperial subjects would instill in British males the manly discipline necessary to rule the empire, create a cultural bond that would hold the empire together in the competitive era of "New Imperialism," and cultivate in Britain's imperial subjects the moral character necessary to achieve the "civilizing mission." Beyond the formal empire, British businessmen and bureaucrats brought soccer to nations that had significant commercial links to the United Kingdom—Argentina, Uruguay, Switzerland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and France. Tourism and migration also figured highly in the spread of British sports to other societies. British expatriates and tourists brought rugby to the French capital and provinces. British subjects living in Paris established the first French rugby club in 1872 and the "English Colony" of wealthy tourists who wintered in Pau, in southwestern France, established the section Palois rugby club and supplied many of its players until the Great War. Expanding education and travel networks also facilitated the informal proliferation of new sports. Cuban students who studied in Mississippi introduced baseball to Havana in the late 1850s. By the 1890s, the depth of Cuban baseball talent was so profound that dozens of Cuban baseballers played on American professional teams.
In such trends lie the roots of contemporary global society. The long-term social and cultural reconfigurations that accompanied the rise of the mass press in the nineteenth century began the process of uncoupling the sense of community from a physical location, an important shift that underlay the development of national communities and a global consciousness. The press and, later, other mass media also facilitated the constitution and reconstitution of novel cultural and social networks and communities that transcended barriers of nations, time, and distance. More and more of these new communities developed around the emerging leisure and sports culture in modernizing nations.
Sports that in the twentieth century became global ones with standardized rules, business practices, and transnational fan communities found their origins in nineteenth-century local settings. Soccer, the twentieth century's most popular sport, was originally the pastime of English public school boys, whose alumni codified the rules of the game in London in 1863. By the early twentieth century, soccer clubs, associations, and leagues using the English-style rules had been established across the planet. Baseball was codified in New York City in the 1840s by lower-middle-class merchants, clerks, firefighters, and coopers who enjoyed the "American Pastime" on a rented field in Hoboken, New Jersey. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was played widely in North America, the Caribbean, and Japan, spread by both American and Cuban travelers and refugees.
The history of the bicycle illustrates many of these same convergent trends. The bicycle emerged as an object of mass consumption in many societies at roughly the same time—the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. German innovator Baron von Drais, the chief forestry officer of the Grand Duchy of Baden, invented the draisienne, the precursor to modern bicycles, in 1817 in an effort to speed his forest inspection tours. The draisienne featured a wood frame that linked two wooden wheels rimmed with iron. The rider pushed the machine forward and backward with his feet and braked by applying shoe pressure to the front wheel.
Between the 1860s and the 1890s, Scottish, French, and American craftsmen invented and exchanged key technologies and industrial processes that contributed to the development of the modern, all-metal, two-wheel, pedal-driven bicycle. Bicycle innovators in different workshops knew of their rivals' technologies and borrowed ideas freely from each other. Mass production of the bicycle led to a rapid decline in prices and a sharp increase in demand. By the mid-1890s, most people could afford bicycles. A "bicycle craze" erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and Europeans and Americans bought tens of millions of machines. Annual bicycle sales in France grew from 203,026 units in 1894 to 3,552,000 in 1914. American sales peaked in the mid-1890s. Robert Smith estimates that Americans bought 400,000 bicycles in 1895 and had invested $500 million in bicycles and bicycle accessories by 1896. Adults rather than children comprised the first generation of cyclists. American suffragist Frances Willard learned to ride a bicycle in 1895 at age 53 and wrote of her experiences to encourage other women to ride. The learning process involved twenty-two hours of private lessons over three months, some of which were conducted under the guidance and protection of six strong young men and women who lifted Willard onto the machine, pushed her from behind, steered the bicycle, and hovered around her in case she lost her balance.
The bicycle emerged as a potent cultural symbol that was synonymous with modernity and progress, for good or for ill. The technological evolution of the bicycle allowed humans to move faster than almost any creature or machine constructed by the 1890s. With Western society increasingly obsessed with speed and technology, the possibilities offered by the bicycle captivated the popular imagination. The bicycle symbolized the increasing democratization of society. More and more men and women from all levels of the social hierarchy gained access to the freedom and mobility that bicycles accorded. Since the act of riding a bicycle was the same for men and women—it was the only mass sport in which the rules and equipment were the same for both sexes—feminists hailed the bicycle as a sign of female emancipation and of the leveling of the social playing field. Frances Willard and her fellow American suffragists recognized the power of the bicycle and "rejoiced together greatly in perceiving the impetus that this uncompromising but fascinating and illimitably capable machine would give to that blessed 'woman question.'" For others, the bicycle embodied many of the social and cultural threats of modernity, especially the dissolution of traditional class barriers and gender roles. British physician Arabella Kenealy, recounting the cautionary, fictitious tale of "Clara," a young female bicycler, concluded:
Clara the athlete was no longer the Clara I remembered two years earlier.... Where before her beauty was suggestive and elusive, now it is defined.... Her movements are muscular and less womanly.... As the greatest charm of Clara's face—the charm that she has lost in the suspicion of "bicycle face" (the face of muscular tension)—was incommunicable, a dainty elusive quality which could not be put into words nor reproduced on canvas, so the highest of all attributes are silent, as for example sympathy.
Kenealy argued that medical evidence demonstrated that the bicycle and other sports "unsexed" women and led them to abandon motherhood and the domestic sphere.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Selling the Yellow Jersey by Eric Reed. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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